Television screens airing a presidential debate at a sports bar in Washington, DC in 2020. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
(CNN) — CNN’s coverage of the 1980 US presidential election, broadcast just five months after the network’s launch, featured the analog predecessor of its now-essential election night prop: the “Magic Wall” electoral map.
Visible behind a dedicated Election Desk at CNN’s Atlanta studio, the technology was far from magical (at one point, a producer is seen updating the map manually behind the anchors, his back to the camera). But as results poured in, the undeclared states changed color, one by one, until Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter turned the orange map almost entirely… blue.
Over on NBC that night, newscaster David Brinkley joked that the western part of his network’s Republican-heavy map was so blue it was “beginning to look like a suburban swimming pool.” On CBS, meanwhile, Walter Cronkite told viewers that “the United States looks like it’s certainly red, white and blue… but mostly blue, tonight.”
CNN's 1980 election night coverage shows the US map turned almost entirely blue, as Republican Ronald Reagan swept to victory. (CNN)
The idea that Republicans are red and Democrats are blue may, today, feel embedded in the symbolism, branding and vernacular — think “blue” states and “red” states — of US politics. But the current configuration has only been cemented in the public imagination since the 2000 US presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Until the turn of the millennium, the colors were often the “other” way around. But which you saw depended on where you got your news — and when, given that outlets sometimes switched their color-coding between elections.
On that night in 1980, for instance, ABC was the outlier, showing Republicans as red, having used yellow for the party four years earlier. During the network’s 1984 election coverage, Brinkley, by then at ABC, offered a seemingly arbitrary on-air explanation for the decision: “Red, R, Reagan — that’s why we chose red.”
Colorful history
The GOP’s links to blue are far older than those to red. It’s an association that arguably dates to the American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln’s Union Army was often identified by its dark blue uniforms, versus the gray traditionally worn by the Confederate’s military.
The shade was also actively employed by the party in the 20th century. Since the 1970s, as campaign branding became more sophisticated, the Republicans’ logos have largely been blue (though so, too, have the majority of the Democrats’ logos). At an election night event at Republican headquarters in Washington DC in 1984, a huge map was erected on the back wall, where organizers ripped away green covers from each state to reveal sparkly blue fabric for the 49 states that announced for Reagan.
A blue button produced for Republican Ronald Reagan's 1980 election campaign. (Smith Collection/Gado Images/Sipa USA)
Internationally, blue is often linked with wealth and conservatism, having historically been the most expensive color to produce. Red, meanwhile, has long been associated with radicalism.
Like the blood of workers rising against their oppressors, red features on the flags, logos and ensigns of left-leaning political organizations, from radical communists (think “Red China”) to the social democratic parties of Western Europe, Canada and Australia. As such, some of the earliest electoral maps, like Scribner’s 1883 Statistical Atlas of the United States, used a red-for-Democrat, blue-for-Republican scheme that would have been familiar to political observers outside the US.
Yet, neither party has ever had an official color. And for the media, this did not especially matter: Until the 1970s, election news was broadcast in black and white, while newspapers were mostly printed in cheaper monochrome, meaning contrast mattered more than color.
Network convergence
With the advent of color television, it was little surprise that the colors of the US flag became the predominant shades used by networks on election night. And when, in 1976, NBC launched an electoral map lit up by thousands of lightbulbs, it seemed only natural to stick with international norms — Britain’s, in particular.
“Without giving it a second thought, we said blue for conservatives, because that’s what the parliamentary system in London is, red for the more liberal party,” Roy Wetzel, then general manager of NBC’s election unit, told the Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. “And that settled it. We just did it.”
Two "Goldwater girls" campaigning for Barry Goldwater, the Republicans' 1968 presidential candidate, with blue placards. (Miller/BIPs/Getty Images)
John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail in Wisconsin ahead of the 1960 presidential election. (Stan Wayman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock)
So, why did networks switch?
It’s a question with no definitive answer. From 1984, CBS joined ABC in labeling Republicans red and Democrats blue. CNN switched at the 1992 presidential election and NBC followed suit in 1996, though it chose more of a pink shade for that year’s Republican nominee, Bob Dole.
There is no evidence that the major networks actively coordinated; they may simply have copied one another until they all aligned with ABC’s arbitrary R-for-Reagan logic. After all, ABC’s evening news was, by the turn of the 1990s, the most watched among the major networks.
CNN staffers approached for this story recall aligning with other media to avoid confusing audiences. NBC News’ former executive vice president, William Wheatley, meanwhile told Vox in 2016 that his network had also decided to mirror its competitors’ approach “so as not to have a confusion for the viewers.”
Blue placards supporting Republican candidates George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle in 1992, by which time CNN, CBS and ABC's electoral maps were all using red for the GOP. (Diana Walker/The Chronicle Collection/Getty Images)
And while it is plausible the Democrats had been unhappy about being associated with a color carrying negative, McCarthyist connotations (the anti-communist “Red Scare” will have been fresher in the memory in the years after the Cold War), there is similarly no evidence that networks deemed the association unfair, or that the party lobbied them to change.
The decisive election
If TV stations were broadly aligned by 1996, print media outlets still played by their own rules. Time magazine reported that year’s result with a map showing Bill Clinton as red and Dole as blue, while the Washington Post’s 2000 election front page also featured a color map marking Democrats as red.
Nonetheless, 2000 marked a watershed moment. And that’s because color-coded maps were, perhaps, never so important in understanding an election’s outcome.
Bush vs. Gore was among the tightest and most contentious races in US history. Amid recounts, litigation and a Supreme Court ruling on Florida’s decisive result (the state’s 25 Electoral College votes eventually carried Bush to victory), the election dragged out for over a month. Maps offered the media an invaluable way of communicating how the race had unfolded, nationally and within Florida, where individual counties were on a knife’s edge.